Taking the mess out of organizing, and leaving the joy

There is a pattern I first noticed while conducting the European Report on the State of Digital Organizing, and have watched repeat in organization after organization since.

The leadership believes in it wholeheartedly. They want the message going out in the language of the communities it is meant for, rather than in the language of the office.

Then it goes out in that language.

Within a week or two, somebody senior is uneasy. It isn't wrong, exactly. It just isn't how they would have said it — a word is carrying weight nobody intended. Eventually somebody says the sentence that ends these programs.

It's off brand.

Which raises a question I have never heard asked out loud in any of those rooms: how is anybody supposed to put something into a language that isn't their own?

What happens next is one of two things, and you will recognize both. The organization quietly stops, and goes back to messages written at headquarters and pushed outward, which at least nobody has to worry about. Or it keeps the program and puts a process around it, so that everything a supporter sends passes under somebody's eye first.

The second sounds like the responsible choice. In practice it produces copy and paste.

Once every word has to be approved, the only efficient thing to hand people is words that are already approved. That is what the people on the ground get: a block of text and a suggested caption. The cost of that is not aesthetic. It is that a person's own community can tell. They know how she writes and why this matters to her, and they know she did not write this. The single thing that made her worth asking — the belonging we have been talking about — is precisely what the process removed. What is left is a million identical messages, worth very little.

A few days ago, in the chapter Strategic Campaign Slop, I argued that mass-produced political content persuades nobody, because people can tell when nothing was authored at all. This is the same failure, and worse. There, nobody in particular was behind the message. Here the organization was, and we processed the human component out of it.

Notice the shape of the decision and how it repeats. The approval steps in your organization were introduced on days when something had gone wrong, and each one was reasonable that day. They layer on over time, and it is very rare that anybody removes a messaging bottleneck once it is built.

I want to argue that this reflex is not just costly. It is aimed at almost nothing.

There is a rule in the study of how groups perform, from Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman, that Colin Fisher applies to the question of when it is worth intervening at all. About sixty percent of a group's effectiveness is determined by its structure: who is in it, what it exists to do, how the work is designed, what the norms are. Another thirty percent is decided at the launch — the first meeting, where that structure becomes a working process. Everything after that, all the encouragement and facilitation and management, accounts for roughly ten percent.

Sixty, thirty, ten.

Every instrument in the tightening reflex operates in the ten. Review, approval, sign-off, the extra check-in — all of them act on work that already exists, long after the conditions that would have shaped it were set. They are the weakest tools available.

Why do we reach for them anyway? I think the reason is simple. They give us a sense of control. Reading something before it goes out feels like managing. Deciding six weeks earlier what a group is allowed to decide for itself feels like paperwork.

It is the same reason people fear flying more than driving, when driving is far more dangerous. Nobody has their own hand on the wheel.

In the study Fisher uses as his anchor, structural changes accounted for something like a third of the gap between the strongest and weakest teams, while even good coaching moved things far less. There is a sharper finding underneath it: bad coaching harms a badly structured team roughly three times as much as a well structured one. The instinct to intervene harder after something has gone wrong is not neutral. It deepens the damage.

So what is structure, concretely? Here is a hint: it is not bureaucracy.

It is who is in the group, and how many. What the group exists to do. What it can decide on its own, and where it needs approval. What success looks like. And how anyone, including the group itself, would know they had started moving against their mission. That is most of it — agreed in advance, and precisely what lets them lead themselves.

Look at that list closely and something becomes obvious. Building it takes expertise.

Every item is something somebody had to learn, and the people who know it learned it over years. That is why organizations don't build it, and it isn't because they don't believe in it. Doing it properly takes somebody who knows how, for every group, at the moment that group starts, which is exactly the moment when nobody who knows how is in the room.

Which is, of course, why we reach instead for the thing that is easy to control: copy-editing for brand voice.

If the structure had already settled when material must sound like the organization and when a leader is free to write as herself, there would be a gain in quality and in hours the organization could spend elsewhere. Nobody would need to read personal messages first. The brand would be doing its job at the point where it costs nothing, instead of at the point where it costs you the only thing you were after.

Fisher tells a story about this that I find memorable, and I say that as someone who does not follow basketball. In 2004 the United States sent to the Olympics what was on paper the most talented squad in the tournament, assembled after five of the players they wanted withdrew, with almost no time practising together. Their coach said afterwards that they had picked the team more or less at random and never had time to prepare. They took bronze.

Four years later, USA Basketball did not respond by adding oversight. It did the opposite. It abolished the selection committee, handed one person full authority, and asked the players for a multi-year commitment. That team won gold.

The committee was the control mechanism. Getting rid of it was the fix.

The 2004 team did all the things we call team-building. They lived together and played cards and threw parties. They had the fun. It did not make them a team, and by every account it was not much fun by the end. You do not bond your way into a group that works. You become one by doing something well together, and the enjoyment turns out to be downstream of that rather than a substitute for it.

That is what it means to take the mess out of organizing but leave the joy.

I would be shocked if anybody ever felt closer to a cause by copying a paragraph out of a toolkit into their own feed. What she wanted was to say the thing herself, to people who know her. The mess was never the price of letting her. The mess was the missing structure that could have built trust between the organization and the everyday people who want to make a difference.

That decision can be made once, in advance, by somebody with the expertise — and my team has spent the last stretch building that expertise in. The group set up properly before it meets, the edges drawn, and the questions answered by a coach carrying fourteen years of organizing and leadership practice, so the volunteer does not have to go and learn it first.

She gets to become an organizer by running her group, instead of having to become one before anybody will let her start.